Guilt
by SinsofMidnight
Summary: Grief never dealt with in the manga/anime. Contains various mature themes, and a lemon... Rated M. Commission from UnderAbigailsRose(formerly xXTheMe4LessModestXx) on dA.


_I know it has been a while since you all last heard from me. I'm posting this recently finished piece to let you all know that I'm not dead :))_**  
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_Enjoy!  
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**Guilt**

_**Fandom:** Vampire Knight_

_**Teaser:** "I knew it intellectually, but emotionally, I was finally beginning to realize it: I could lay on his grave in the pouring rain, but it still wouldn't bring my brother back to me, undo the part I played in his death, or mean that his blood wasn't running through my veins or that it wasn't that gift that gave me enough sanity to morn him."_

_**Inspiration:** An image from the manga of Zero lying on his brother's grave._

_Commission from UnderAbigailsRose(formerly xXTheMe4LessModestXx) on dA.  
Commission # 07._

_**Rating: **M_

_**Warnings:  
**-Character Death  
-Extensive Grief  
-Life Affirmation Smex  
-General Depression and Angst_

_**Main Pairing: **Zero Kirryu/Touga Yagari_

_**Setting: **Follows Ichiru's death in the manga time-line_

_**POV:** Zero, because he's the one who lost half of himself... _

_**Additional ANs:** I apologize in advance for any places where this doesn't quite meet the story line. The truth of the matter is that it had been a while since I have read the manga, and I really couldn't recall what chapter Ichiru died in to reread it... I've read chapter summaries to refresh myself, but there are still simple liberties I took with these characters, mainly because we never see either of them truly grieve in the manga..._

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Letting him find me like this was a mistake.

It was the first clear though to cross my mind in days and I clung to the clarity of it, but I didn't move.

My brother. My twin. My other half. He was dead. He was dead, and I could still taste the copper tang of his blood on my tongue. Grief and guilt weren't new to me: I'd see tragedy before in my life and I'd done things I wasn't proud of. But this overwhelming mixture of the two –the grief making me numb and the guilt tying my stomach in knots– was only a week or so old.

It had been raining ever since that day, as though whatever omnipotent deity that looked down from the heavens shared my loss and knew just how _robbed _the world was by his death. Despite the rain, I still came out here to this soggy graveyard. The freshly dug earth became mud and the mud became stains on my clothes and skin as I laid down over his body, the mirror image of my own, and talked to the gray stone marker that tried to summarize my other half in three short sentences.

It was finally sinking in for me, though. I knew it intellectually, but emotionally, I was finally beginning to realize it: I could lay on his grave in the pouring rain, but it still wouldn't bring my brother back to me, undo the part I played in his death, or mean that his blood wasn't running through my veins or that it wasn't that gift that gave me enough sanity to morn him. Even so, it still hurt too damn much to say his name, to _think_ his name, so I was reduced to referring to him by phrases that identified him by his relationship to me but not who he was in the world or who he could have been.

I had known him, better than almost anyone else alive or dead. I had known him as a frail, fragile child who had needed my love and affection to make up for our parents' disappointment. I had known him as her servant and had understood his love for the woman who made me what I am. I had known him as an angry, grieving young man, trapped somewhere between childhood and adulthood, driven by his grief to find justice for her. Lastly, I had known him briefly as the man who resigned himself to his own death and gave himself over to me and the monster within me. I _still_ knew him, from the taste of his blood to the feeling of having him in my head and in my veins. Each beat of my heart commanded his blood through my body.

"Zero."

Shissou's voice was gentle, but only one who knew him would ever guess that His voice had always been gruff, as long as I could remember, roughened by the years and his bad habit, the one he'd always said would get him killed one day. I had always like the way he sounded when he spoke, and this was no different. The sound of this brusque man trying to treat me gently brought back the memory of another time, another pain, another loss.

I offered him no reply but I reached out to trace the words on the polished stone with my hand. I wondered if he would just give up like he had at that time, all those years ago, if I behaved like the sullen, resigned child that I had been at that time or if he'd come to realize that it would help no one if he left it alone.

His large hand, his skin kissed by the sun in a way that mine would never be, touched my brother's name in the stone. He traced it briefly with his fingertips before he placed his hand over top of mine.

"Zero," he repeated, his voice a little louder and a little more harsh but holding just as much gentleness and tenderness as he reached out to touch me and my pain.

"There's only so many times you can encounter a suicidal student before you have to do something about it, nee, shissou?" I asked him wryly. My voice sounded almost rusty: I really hadn't used it since my brother had died and the tears had taken their own toll.

"How many days have you been out here?" he asked instead, perhaps avoiding the things I revealed.

"Since they laid him here."

"You're going to get sick doing stupid things like this," he told me gruffly. I knew that it showed he cared only because I knew _him_. To anyone else, his gruff scolding might sound harsh and cruel, but I knew my shissou. I knew he cared, a lot more than he ever wanted anyone to know he did.

For the first time since I'd lost my twin, I felt something other than the guilt and the loss. "Sorry, shissou."

" 'Sorry' doesn't get you off of the ground or out of the rain, Zero." This time, his tone was wry, as though he recognized that making me acknowledge what I was doing to myself wasn't going to fix it.

"Chairman Cross told me that there was a point in my life that he had anticipated me making a mess of my clothes: he'd just expected it to be earlier," I offered, sitting up and still facing the gray marker as I realized just how covered with mud I truly was.

Shissou snorted at that. "You used to do it all the time, but I thought you'd grown out of it."

"Evidentially not yet."

He sat down on the damp ground beside me, ignoring the mud that had to be getting on his coat and his slacks and the rain that had to be plastering his dark and somewhat unruly hair to his head. "Is this about losing him or feeling him too much?"

Ah, Shissou. Straight to the heart of the matter, as usual. "It's about both," I told him, acknowledging the true issue for the first time. "It's about losing him, thinking he was dead, finding out he wasn't quite who I thought he was, and watching him lose her. But it's also about knowing the other side of all those situations, feeling his affections and his grief, and knowing that he knew his death would save my sanity."

Warm, strong arms wrapped around me and pulled me against him. It seemed I wasn't the only person who didn't mind a little mud. "Concentrate on that last part. He was dying, anyway. What his last act on this Earth was indicates just how important you were to him." His words were quiet and solemn in a way I'd never heard before.

I looked at him for the first time since he'd found me here. There was a dark circle under his one eye, the other one lost years ago in an incident that could be recounted another time, and his eye, itself, seemed much sadder than it used to. I'd gotten so lost and wrapped up in my own pain that I'd forgotten that other people had known and loved my brother.

"I suppose it shows just what kind of man he had become. I... Ichiru thought of others, even as he died." Just saying his name was hard on me, but Shissou's arms tightened around me.

"Exactly. He became a good man."

"I suspect you can be blamed for part of that," I told him softly, leaning into him for strength and comfort and solace, just as I had when I was a small child.

"I doubt that. He was confined to bed during many of our lessons."

"He always made me tell him about the lessons when I got back." I had never told anyone these things, but I suspected Shissou needed to hear them. "He always wanted to be out there with us, but making me repeat each lesson was as close as he could get, some days. So I'd sit on the bed and regurgitate the day's lessons and make faces at him until he'd smile for me."

He said nothing, but I knew that he was trying to process things. But his arms tightened around me again and I could feel his heartbeat through his chest and against my back.

"When we were young, he pretty much worshiped the ground you walked on. Both of us did. Our parents kind of ignored him when they could because he was sickly and weak, but you never treated him like he was any different than I was and _that_ was incredibly special to him." I stared straight ahead at the gray stone as I felt him rest his head against my shoulder blade. I pretended not to notice the warm tears and the soft sobs, and he, in turn, pretended that I wasn't crying as well.

We stayed there together, sharing our quiet grief in front of the grave stone, on top of my brother's grave. Shissou's arms were there to remind me that I wasn't alone, but the emotional numbness was still lingering heavily, like a monumental weight on my shoulders.

The numbness was what really got to me. Half of myself, half of my identity, my childhood, my memories –half of _me_ was gone. I should have been more broken. I should have been a shattered mess. But my insulation was also my curse, although it also didn't help that I could feel him _inside_ of me.

Shissou pushed the hair back out of my eyes and kissed my forehead like I was a child again. His action stirred up a spark of... _something_ inside of me. And that _something_ was a whole world of better than this _nothing_ that I had been living in.

I turned my head to say something to him just in time to clash our lips together.

The warmth it stirred in me made me press into him, trying to deepen the action.

The kiss went from zero to sixty in under thirty seconds. Suddenly, those warm strong hands were lifting me, turning me, shifting me, until I was in his lap, my groin pressing against his. The heat that seared through me was thawing out the numbness in my heart, so I was all for this.

Our muddy clothes were shed quickly, falling to the ground or getting thrown over the stone. We were naked and muddy in the rain, our hair plastered to our faces, our hands all over each other the kindle the fire to keep both of us warm. His mouth was hot and hungry, his hands rough and calloused and all over me, scuffing my soft skin in a way I couldn't believe I was loving. My hands were tangled in his hair, sliding down his back, cupping his ass to increase the contact. I couldn't get enough of actually _feeling something_.

I was pressed back onto the stone, lifted to rest on top. I wrapped my legs around his slender waist as he stretched me enough that I wouldn't bleed. He plunged into me. I showered kisses all over his face, imitating the rain that was still falling from the heavens like tears.

It was brief, intense, eternal. We both came pretty quickly, in all honesty. Reality didn't set in until I could feel Shissou's semen dripping out on me and onto the stone beneath me.

Ichiru's gravestone.

We had just had sex on my brother's gravestone.

Never mind that it had been Shissou, and that the man had been grieving as much as I was, in his own way. Never mind how it had started out. I had just committed one of the most primal, life-assuring acts on the grave of my twin brother.

To say that I felt lower than shit would have been the understatement of the century.

As for what happened next... well, if anyone ever asked me about it later, _it never happened._

I collapsed into Shissou, shivering and shaking and crying. I sobbed and wailed and flailed helplessly until Shissou folded me into his arms gently. He cradled me to him like I was fragile and special and it made me cry even harder.

It never struck me as strange that i was naked and vulnerable in his arms, that he was nude too, that he was gruffly whispering words of comfort into my ear and against my hair and against my skin. All I knew was that I was falling apart. And, like he'd always been, my shissou was there for me, holding me, comforting me, and picking up the pieces.

_The worst part of losing a loved one is the guilt of surviving._ The thought hit me with a startling clarity.

It was so true. I knew that everyone and everything under the sun and under the moon had to die at some point. It was the cycle of life.

It wasn't his _death_ that I couldn't handle. It was that I was still here, without him.

I felt guilty for outliving a man that should have died during his childhood. Never mind the extra years he got to have, the memories he got to make, that he got a chance to love.

Ichiru was the better half of us, in all ways. Yet, here I was as the one who survived.

It took a while before my sobs subsided and the tears went away. Shissou kept me wrapped tightly in his warm arms even afterward, as though he could sense that I was balanced on a precarious edge.

Oh, my tears would eventually dry up.

But my guilt for being alive was going to stay with me forever.

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**OWARI**

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**End Notes:** I know that I didn't deal with the fact Zero and Toga had sex. There's a method to the madness: you just won't like it.

The point of this piece became Zero's _guilt_ over being the one who lived and his inferiority complex. Despite the complexity of this sudden sexual relationship with Toga, his mind is still wrapped in the guilt and tears and the fact he's alive still. The reason I didn't deal with the sex as anything but sex is because at this point, Zero can't tear himself away from the loss long enough to see what happened between him and Toga as anything but a physical reaction to his desperate need to feel something.

So when he shatters, that's why he doesn't pay any mind to the nudity or the fact that Toga is going out of his way and slightly out of his normal character to offer him comfort. The psychological complexity of his current situation won't allow him to see anything else yet.

See? And now all of you think I'm a psych major :P (I'm an education major, haha, but I have to take psych classes anyway ^^ )

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_**Anyway! Love it or hate it, that's it so far. The commission is filled. This story is told, for now. I might add more later, but that is only if I finish my 20,000 other in-progress stories, haha.**_

_**Let me know what you think, how you feel, how insane/mean/bitchy I am for leaving it how I did... Comments are love :)  
**_

_**Until next time,**_

~Sins~


End file.
